Hi Rob,
Le 4 janv. 12 à 02:24, Rob Weir a écrit :
Note that this does not become your product's name. It is a logo,
like "Intel Inside", that can be used by 3rd party products that
include or are based on an Apache product.
This point is ESSENTIAL, and imho, only official Apache
OpenOffice.org websites should use the logo.
Though, if 3rd party product want to mention they are based on Apache
product, then they can write it, and why not, add the apache logo.
But not the OpenOffice.org one.
So it allows you to grow your own brand while accurately expressing
your use of the Apache code. We'd need to think how this could work
with products based on legacy OOo releases, pre Apache.
This is a bad track. Indeed, people are already completly confused.
At one recent event, I discussed with some around 20 average french
people (randomly, average users, not following OpenOffice.org story),
and the result is :
- Oracle is the current OpenOffice.org owner
- OpenOffice.org is no longer free and Oracle killed it
- LibreOffie is the new name of OpenOffice.org
- Apache OpenOffice is yet another fork, nobody knows and nobody cares.
It took me a long time to explain them what happened in meantime.
I invite everybody to repeat the test, and share what they obtain.
But I think something similar could be discussed.
If we wanted, we could also include a link on the main download
page, pointing too White Label Office, but we'd need to be fair and
offer the same kind of link to anyone else who was based on OOo,
and who was respecting the trademarks, e.g., LibreOffice, Symphony,
etc.
IMHO, the right decision is to NOT add external links at all : easy
to manage, and always fair for all.
To justify this point of view, I got one famous example in mind : one
NeoOffice link was added (Simon Phipps around already ...) on the
main OpenOffice.org porting project web page. It was a disaster for
OpenOffice.org because people were confused, and thought NeoOffice
was the "official" Mac OS X port. This way, NeoOffice derivated a
long time the porting project forces, including donations who were
derivated too.
The case is exactly the same with LibreOffice today, and I strongly
suggest to retain the lesson of the past, and to not redo the same
mistake.
Defend the name, and control the logo usage, is ESSENTIAL. Just
wondering how long it will take to the Apache people, to understand
that it was the worse decision ever to rename** OpenOffice.org into
Apache OpenOffice (instead of Apache OpenOffice.org, far better).
Regards,
Eric Bachard
**I bet there are a lot of LibreOffice / TDF supporters in the list
of the people who voted for the change.
--
qɔᴉɹə
Projet OOo4Kids : http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page
L'association EducOOo : http://www.educoo.org
Blog : http://eric.bachard.org/news
